Connecting this headset to your computer is as straight forward as any other set. There are two main connections, the microphone and audio connection, as well as a secondary connection, the one between the volume control and the headphones themselves. The main

Once setup we began by testing the headphones with various music and movies. Now sound is subjective, what sounds good to one person may not sound good to another. So before you buy any set of headphones I would recommend you try them first if possible. The audio card used in these test was the onboard audio found on the Abit IP35 Pro, the Realtek ALC888 HD audio. Most PC users use onboard audio, though a sound card can and does generally perform better the onboard audio. The difference for most users is very small. And of course the operating system was Windows Vista Ultimate.

With both music and video the sound quality was above normal, in music you could clearly identify instruments; bass was a bit muffled at times but was still decent. With movies there was good voice definition and sound effects came across clear enough. I did notice some distortion and popping when the volume on the inline controller was turned all the way up. But anything from a quarter turn below maximum was fine.

Moving onto gaming, we tested the headphones with several titles, ranging from Call of Duty 4 to company of heroes. Voice communication was testing using in game VOIP from both Crysis as well EVE-Online. And finally we used TeamSpeak 2 as well as the Microsoft speech recognition to wrap up the microphone testing.

Sound reproduction for games was good. There was decent clarity for sounds such as footsteps and silenced rifle fire. Explosions came across as a little bland. Though some of that can be placed on the sound card itself the headphones really did not impress when it came to bass.

The microphone itself worked ok, to be really effective the microphone required a 30DB boost provided by the sound card. This basically points the microphone not being very sensitive. Anything below 30DB required the use of an elevated voice in order to be Cleary heard. The microphone actually worked better when it was placed in static position on the monitor pointed directly at the speaker.